It’s a well-known fact: in order to follow doctor’s orders, you have to be healthy as a horse.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKAI slide my arm from under the sleeper’s head and it is numb, full of swarming pins, on the tip of each, waiting to be counted, the fallen angels sit.
More Wislawa Szymborska Quotes
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I’m drowning in papers.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Whether you want it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political tone. your eyes a political color. You walk with political steps on political ground.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
They say the first love’s most important. That’s very romantic, but not my experience.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I don’t know the role I’m playing. I only know it’s mine, non-convertible.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Life lasts but a few scratches of the claw in the sand.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
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Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA -
Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
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Is a decision made in advance really any kind of choice?
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA